Silverman, Meyer

ORAL HISTORY OF MEYER D. SILVERMAN, PH.D.
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
October 2, 2003
[Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Mike, let’s get started first by asking you how and why you first came to Oak Ridge, okay?
Dr. Silverman: Yes, we arrived in Oak Ridge in the middle of December, 1943 via Chicago. I had been hired to work on the Manhattan Project, and we arrived in Chicago a month earlier. Upon my arrival, Dr. [James] Franck, Director of the Chemistry Division said, “You do not have to ask anybody what this project’s all about. We’re out to make an atomic bomb.”
Mr. Kolb: He told you that?
Dr. Silverman: “Now go into the library and bring yourself up in this field.” A month later, he said that I was a free agent and should look around to where I wanted to work, because the slurry type of reactor for which they had hired me was not going to be pursued because it would be a long term project, and we did not have that time since the Germans were already working in atomic energy. So we arrived – so after talking to the various section heads in the Chemistry Division in Chicago, I could have worked for Seaborg or Coriell or George Boyd. The director and research director of Clinton Labs, the forerunner of ORNL, they were interviewing people and trying to induce them to come down to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Who was that Research Director?
Dr. Silverman: The Research Director was Richard Doan and the Director was M. D. Whitaker, a former student of Dr. Karl Compton. They also wanted to know what Dorothy, my wife, was doing and whether we had a family. Upon learning that she had been a secretary to patent attorneys at RCA before we went to Chicago, Doan turned to Whitaker and said, “Hire this man; don’t let him out of your sight.” So we came to Oak Ridge in December ’43, were housed at the Andrew Johnson in Knoxville for a week to ten days, by which time things became a bit boring. The housing that was offered to us was dormitory housing with separate women’s and men’s dormitories. We declined, and so we obtained an apartment – well, actually, not quite an apartment, a master bedroom and bath with a TVA Economist in the Island Home section of Knoxville. Since I had been working on important projects at the Permutit Water Conditioning Company prior to going to Chicago, I had a B ration card for my automobile.
Mr. Kolb: Gasoline.
Dr. Silverman: And, as a result, was able to drive from Knoxville to Oak Ridge, so we drove a car pool for a couple of months from Knoxville to Oak Ridge. Up at 6:00, pick your passengers up at 6:30 in the morning, drive to the Laboratory, eat breakfast at “O’Dell’s Ptomaine Café” on the Lab’s grounds, the cafeteria, leave the Lab after 4:30, get back into Knoxville, have dinner, and get back to the room about 8:00 p.m. And that went on for six days a week.
Mr. Kolb: Was your wife working then, too?
Dr. Silverman: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Dr. Silverman: Dot started working immediately for Dr. Isadore Perlman. Perlman was Seaborg’s right-hand man and they had split Seaborg’s section in half. One half remained in Chicago under Seaborg, the other half went down to Oak Ridge under Perlman where the plutonium separation from uranium was being done. So two months later in February of 1944, we were offered a flattop somewhere on Alger Road. Examined the house �� there was like a two to three inch separation in the floor of the living room. You could see the ground below. It had a potbelly stove. So we declined and were able to obtain an “A” cemesto at 107 Kingfisher Lane in the latter part of March 1944. Meanwhile, sometime during February of ’44, I was invited down to Fort Oglethorpe along with about fifteen hundred other potential draftees. I had received greetings. However, within three to five days – I can’t recall – of the notice that I was to be drafted, the project had taken steps to –
Mr. Kolb: Exempt you.
Dr. Silverman: – exempt me. At that time, I had reached my twenty-ninth birthday, so I was not in the under-twenty-six category. A close friend of ours, John Boyle, who was working next to me, was drafted into the Army and returned to the Laboratory at fifty dollars a month instead of – probably his former salary might have two hundred dollars a month.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, big drop.
Dr. Silverman: So, in Oak Ridge at the Laboratory, I was in the Technical Division under Dr. Miles Levert, and our Section Head was Dr. John Huffman, H-U-F-F-M-A-N, a former professor at NYU who had worked with Dr. Harold Urey on isotope separation, who had obtained his Ph.D. from Yale in ’32 and had won the bronze in the saber of the Olympics. Well, I was in the Technical Division and in the section that was looking at future designs for separating the uranium from the wastes engendered by the bismuth phosphate separation process for getting plutonium from uranium. A hundred tons of uranium had been pushed out of the graphite reactor and processed, a third of a ton per day, and we obtained a third of a gram of plutonium per day. That plutonium, we shipped to Los Alamos and some to Washington, some to Chicago for further testing to find its properties and how they would handle those with respect to a nuclear device. We came up with a final process for the separation of uranium from the waste in the spring of ’45. I had a done a sizeable amount of lab work in a borrowed lab up near the graphite reactor in which I had looked at various solvents for extracting the uranium from the wastes. In fact, Jim Lane and I were involved and Jim had said, “Mike, why don’t you do the lab work. I’m a lousy lab man; you’re real good. I’ll look at the calculations, what we have to do.” So we did that and when we came up with a design and drawings were made for equipment in the various cells of 3019, we went to Dr. Levert and said, “Look, we’ve got this process laid out for extracting the uranium from the wastes.” We had developed a process design which involved a solvent extraction column, and Dr. Levert objected to our using a column process because he felt that all our eggs were in one basket, and if something happened in the cell and we couldn’t get in there, we’d be stuck. Solvent extraction had been used in the petroleum industry but not to the extent that we were envisioning. He suggested that a design should encompass a series of mixer settler tanks in each of the various separation cells, so if something happened in one cell, we would move to the next, continue with the process. However, when the design was practically complete, the Army said, “We don’t need that uranium; forget about the process.” They were hauling in pitchblende from the Belgian Congo, so they felt there was no shortage of uranium. As it turned out, this decision was not a fortunate one for the Lab. Ten years later, Dr. Willis Baldwin in the Chemistry and then in Chemical Technology Division came to me and explained that the waste tanks on the upper level were being filled and we had to do something about making more room for additional waste from the RaLa process and other things going on at the Laboratory and I told him the best bet at that time was to precipitate the uranium out of the waste, probably as a peroxide. So I assumed that was done.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Dr. Silverman: Ten years later, Willis came over and said, “We have taken off some of the supernatant liquids in the tanks, but we’re still in need of more room. What do we do now?” I says, “You’ve probably got a heavy precipitate at the bottom of these tanks, and it may have hardened somewhat. I think you’re going to have to get a sump pump down in those tanks and some method of heating the liquid to slurry out the uranium. I assumed that they did something similar, and years later a small semi-pilot process was set up at the foot of the road which led from the east part of the Laboratory and the walkway led down past the lower tanks and you then took a right turn to go up to the Cafeteria and the 3019 building. Well, the lower waste tanks were used for lesser active wastes, see, so a small pilot – oh there was a, I forget the exact equipment, but it was placed in that area, and they proceeded to start processing that waste.
Mr. Kolb: This was up in the ’60s or ’70s by then?
Dr. Silverman: Uh, yeah. Yes. Well when Willis came the first time, it was in the ’50s, then in the ’60s. Meanwhile, we had been doing a lot of RaLa processing for Los Alamos, Radio Lanthanum, which was used as a detector during the bomb tests. Here’s an interesting anecdote regarding the wastes. We would walk from 706A and later the 4500 building past those lower waste tanks, and you could smell degraded solvent odors from the lower waste tanks. What we learned was that at Chicago they were working on a hexone process using hexone as a solvent for the solvent extraction process separation, and with no waste facilities at Oregon, they were shipping down nonactive wastes or very little – just containing uranium – to the Laboratory in steel drums. Well the hexone was degraded by nitric acid, which was being used as an additive to help the extraction, and so you could smell things like aldehydes, butyric acid, and we would casually remark, “We’ve just walked by the skunk works.” At that time, a well-known comic strip by Al Capp, Li’l Abner, discussed the fact that Dogpatch was involved with “skonk works.” [Editor’s note: The spelling of “skonk” is the actual eye-dialect spelling from the comic strip.]
Mr. Kolb: So that’s where you got the skunk works, yeah, I see. That’s interesting.
Dr. Silverman: Well, since the design project for separating uranium from the waste was terminated by an Army decision, I went on to some other work and in the summer of ’45, I believe it was, Dr. Boarts, B-O-A-R-T-S, Head of the Chem Engineering Department at the University of Tennessee, started offering a course in heat transfer in the field of Chemical Engineering in Oak Ridge. I took that course. A year later, the University decided that they were going to start a Ph.D. program in Chemistry. Two organic majors working with Dr. Hilton Smith were the first two graduate student involved in a Ph.D. program at the University. I had asked about a Ph.D. in Chem Engineering, but I was informed only the Chemistry Program was being started, and so a year later, in the summer of ’46, after Dr. Huffman had given me a large raise and asked me why I wanted to do a Ph.D., I said, “Well, I can’t give you a direct answer now, but I think it might come in very handy in the future.����� And so I started on the Ph.D. program in Chemistry in the fall of ’46. My Bachelor’s Degree obtained at Yale University in 1934 was followed by a Master’s in Chemistry in 1942 at George Washington University. So I was, shall we say, groomed for a Ph.D. course in Physical Chemistry. I wanted to take my minor in Chem Engineering, but Dr. Boarts said, “No, you’re not going to get off easy. I’m not going to let you do it. Either you do it in math or physics.” So I ended up sitting in on a math course under Dr. Fred Ficken at K-25, and decided after one semester that that was not the math I needed for Chem Engineering purposes. It was more mathematician’s mathematics or abstract. So I decided to do the minor in physics, and I took courses under Dr. Wilford Good in an atomic physics laboratory and in a lecture course on, I would say, atomic and molecular physics, by Dr. Dick Present, who had left the Laboratory to become a full-time professor of physics at the University. So those two courses were my minor. Meanwhile, in order to complete a residency the ’46-’47 year, I commuted from Oak Ridge to Knoxville and took requisite courses in Chemistry, passed a German language exam with no problems, and it had been agreed before I started the Ph.D. program that if I passed my prelims for the doctorate degree that I would then transfer from the Technical Division to the Chemistry Division and do my thesis in the Chemistry Division. I had obtained permission for the academic ’46-’47 year leave from the Labs from Dr. Eugene Wigner who was Director of Research at the Laboratory during that period.
Mr. Kolb: So you were a full-time student at that time?
Dr. Silverman: Yes, I was a full-time student during ’46-’47 year and Mrs. Silverman, who had left her job at the end of the war, went back to work and worked for Dr. Waldo Cohn to support us during that year. When I passed my prelims in October of ’47, I told her she didn’t have to work any longer. I was going to be paid for doing my thesis and I had transferred to the Chemistry Division. My thesis was studying the upper valence states of ruthenium, one of the major fission products, which presented lots of problems during the separation processes that had been evolved and used. We had worked out the transition problems involved between doing a thesis at the Laboratory as compared to doing one at the University and the university students were quite surprised when, upon completion of the thesis, I gave a seminar, and learned how much had been accomplished during the ’47-1950 period, because universities lacked the advanced equipment that the Laboratory had, facilities and all, and so from the fall of ’47 till 1949, my group leader, who was Dr. John Swartout, who became Associate Director, first of the Chemistry Division, then Chemistry Division Director. When he became Chemistry Division Director, he said, “Mike, I’m not going to have the time to follow your thesis work. I think that you should be under another professor,��� and Dr. Henri Levy, who had been giving courses in chemistry for the UT department – but the courses were being given in Oak Ridge – so John suggested I complete the thesis under Dr. Henri Levy, and the final year of the thesis I worked under Dr. Henri Levy. We completed a crystal structure of potassium perruthenate with the aid of Friden calculators before the days of the computer. And we filled a hutment with lots of paper and the fire department said to us, “You’re a fire hazard. You better clean it up.”
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I bet. Was this in the Lab, the hutment?
Dr. Silverman: Yes. It was outside of 706A, where I had done all my lab work for the degree. So that work was completed, and I was then a member of the Chemistry Division under John Swartout.
Mr. Kolb: So you were one of the first, really, graduates of the program.
Dr. Silverman: I was the first Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Oak Ridge. Ken Neville, who had also come onto the program with me, was an organic chemist and finished up his doctorate several months earlier in Organic Chemistry. Actually, I was probably, I believe I was the eighth Ph.D. in chemistry from the UT department, because a number of veterans had come out of the service at the end of the war, and they started their work in ’46 and graduated during the ’49-’50 year. I was awarded my doctorate in August of 1950, and along with me were three other Ph.D.s, the first in education, the first in mathematics, and the first in physics. So there were four of us who obtained our Ph.D. in August of 1950 at the university.
Mr. Kolb: Very good. Well, that got you through the wartime period at least and you got your doctorate degree. That’s great.
Dr. Silverman: Well, during the coming year, during the year ’50-’51 the Laboratory had started preliminary work on the Homogeneous Reactor Project and Dr. Swartout had suggested to me upon completion of the Ph.D. work that, with my chemical engineering background, I ought to look into the possibilities of working in the Chemical Technology Division along with what I might want to do in Chemistry. He pointed out, “You are thirty-five years of age, so you’re ten years older than the average young Ph.D. in the Chemistry Division,” and they had hired eight to ten young Ph.D.s in 1949. I remembered that Dr. Ray Stoughton had gone on a recruiting trip and recruited a number of these young Ph.D.s and had ended up with the disease Polio.
Mr. Kolb: Ray Stoughton got Polio?
Dr. Silverman: Yes, Ray Stoughton came down with Polio as a result of that probably long-term recruiting trip. So I told Dr. Swartout that I did not receive a satisfactory answer from the Director of the Chemical Technology Division, who at that time was Dr. Frank Staley, and that I would continue in the Chemistry Division as a small stone in a bigger pond. I had considered working with Dr. Ralph Brosey in a radiochemical field, but Dr. Swartout also asked me whether I would like to work on the Homogeneous Reactor Project. He said, ��You have a unique background and it�����s going to be very helpful to us on the project.” And my answer to him was, “Well I owe the Laboratory something for having me helped achieve the Ph.D.” So I, the ensuing year, worked on radiation corrosion studies. We would irradiate various ampoules in the Graphite Reactor and examine specimens to see what was happening to those specimens since they were encased in the uranium sulfate solution. Uniquely, one time John Boyle and I were up at the top of the Graphite Reactor. We had set up a brick barrier and had been lowering our samples down into a hole via a pulley arrangement, and we were examining – we would see what was going down there by having a mirror tilted at an angle. One day, Dr. Everitt Blizard of the Physics Division came by and said, “Do you guys know what you’re doing?” He said, “You don’t realize it, but those neutrons are bouncing off that silver mirror, and you’re going to get exposed.” We did something slightly different after that.
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t have any monitors there to check your radiation?
Dr. Silverman: Well, we had the usual badges, but –
Mr. Kolb: I mean survey people. Survey people were not involved?
Dr. Silverman: No, we didn’t. Anyway, I continued working on radiation corrosion problems. Meanwhile, I had also started doing some kinetics work on the decomposition of uranium peroxide in uranyl sulfate solutions using various catalytic species. In the summer of ’53, Dr. George Watson, on leave from the University of Texas under the ORAU program, worked with me that summer doing additional kinetics. He explained that he had not done much lab work and he enjoyed learning the techniques I was using. We were able to inveigle a conductance bridge from Dr. Kurt Kraus of the Chemistry Division. With the aid of that bridge, we were able to study the kinetics in a more detailed fashion, the result of which was three publications on the kinetics involved in uranium and uranyl sulfate solutions. Shortly after that work was completed, Sam Beall who was in charge of the Homogeneous Reactor during its early period, one day called me and said, “Mike, we’re in trouble. We’re getting power surges, like bumping and other things involved in the reactor.”
Mr. Kolb: This is during the HRE operation?
Dr. Silverman: Right, the Homogenous Reactor Experiment. He said, “We don’t know what’s happening, but we can’t explain.” I said, “I think you have some precipitation of the uranium as the peroxide.” I went over to the reactor and although there were two chemists there – Ed Bowlman and Dr. Compier were there – they apparently could not fathom what was going on, or were not enthusiastic about examining solutions. I was able to obtain a sample of the reactor material, ran a spectrophotometric test on the thing, and told Sam Beall, “You do have uranium being precipitated out as the peroxide.” I said, “What’s happening is the radiation is decomposing water, forming hydrogen and oxygen. The uranium is reacting in solution to form the peroxide.” With the aid of the experiments that Dr. Watson and I had performed during the previous summer, I was able to tell Sam that by raising the temperature to a certain point, that we would decompose the peroxide thermally, and after it would dissolve, we then could handle the solution and we would get rid of the bumping. I had laid out a diagram or a plot of the formation of uranium peroxide as a function of the radiation level, how fast the peroxide would form in solution, and the other curve showed the decomposition as a function of temperature. Sam followed that graph and was able to put the reactor back without any further problems.
Mr. Kolb: Well, that was a very important discovery.
Dr. Silverman: So I worked on several other radiation corrosion problems. One had to do with the metal walls which were exposed to radiation in combination with the uranyl sulfate high temperature solutions, and so I worked on several allied projects. And from 1955 to ’57, I worked on these projects separately and this work continued until the latter ’50s when the Homogeneous Reactor Experiment was terminated. I won’t go into detail. Several of them were completed, and one interesting facet of this work was that Sam Beall pointed out that they had detected in the reactor cell leakage of gases from the reactor and he was worried about a fire. It actually had to do with the secondary coolant, where they ran into the problem, and Sam called up and I said, “Well,” I suddenly had a bright idea, I said, “Look, lay your hands on every nitrogen cylinder that you can get on the grounds and just keep flooding that cell with the nitrogen. [If] you don’t have any oxygen, you won’t have a fire until you can shut down the reactor.” And so he did that. Sam was ever thankful for the advice I’d given him during the ’50’s, for in the latter ’60’s, when I was leaving the Reactor Chemistry Division, Sam Beall offered me a position in the Reactor Division. Anyway, to continue with, I��ll summarize –
[Side B]
Mr. Kolb: So to summarize, you say –
Dr. Silverman: In 1960, the Reactor Chemistry Division was formed, the remains of a division that had been at Y-12 working on uranium problems, and the chemists [who] had been involved with the zirconium studies and allied projects at Y-12, they were brought over to X-10, and Dr. Taylor, who was Head of the Chemistry Division at that time transferred a number of us from Chemistry into the newly formed Reactor Chemistry Division, at that time under Warren Grimes. Dr. Taylor used this to, shall we say, get rid of those people in the Chemistry Division who he felt weren’t fulfilling his desires.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, yeah, whatever.
Dr. Silverman: Well I know because I had asked about what the criteria were. When Dr. Watson and I completed the work on all the kinetics for the HRE and all, I asked him, “Dr. Taylor, what were the criteria within the Chemistry Division for advancement? When did you obtain a raise, permission to go to scientific meetings, get elevated to be a group leader?” And I was not given a satisfactory answer to these questions. In fact, I came away with the impression that I was being a troublemaker by asking these questions of an administrator. A number of people came away with a similar impression; they ended up in Reactor Chemistry. Anyway, so I worked in Reactor Chemistry on some solution chemistry, then later on the Nuclear Safety Project studying fiber filtration and came up with a very unique solution to a problem involving how to study the movement of the radioactive particles on fibrous filters, and that ended up in a publication in the journal Science. In fact, the paper was submitted over the objections of Mr. Grimes. And George Watson, who had joined the Laboratory previously, indicated that Grimes might not like the way the paper was written, but scientifically the facts were there and they were correct. So after three months of arguing, the paper was accepted by the editor of Science and published within three weeks. I had a personal call from him. His name was Phil Abelson. Philip Abelson was editor of the magazine Science, and he said, “This is an important paper. I have a couple suggestions to make, to add to the paper, and we’ll publish it as soon as possible.” So it appeared in three weeks.
Mr. Kolb: Well, good. Well, the locals didn’t always appreciate –
Dr. Silverman: That’s right. And the technique was used in the nuclear safety pilot plant for studying the effects of fission product trapping. And in 1968, I was made an offer by Sam Beall, so I transferred from the Reactor Chemistry Division to the Reactor Division, worked a year with Steve Kaplan and Ed Nephew on the nuclear safety information business and then took charge of a project studying fission product transport in a loop at Y-12. And later, in the Reactor Division, did work on – in the summer of ’73, went on loan to what was later to become the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, at that time – I think it was earlier – to look at problems associated with water cooled reactors, which were being pushed at that time, and was there for a year and a half on loan. Then Gordon Fee asked that I come back to help him in Oak Ridge. So we came back in the fall ’74, started to work on loops involved for the Molten Salt, but that project was killed a year later when we were building new loops for studying heat transport and did calculations for a while on heat transfer involving those type of molten salt solutions, and then worked on coal problems in – that was during the ’78 period – developed the process for separating pyrites from coal by magnetic means. I did the basic lab work and later Gene Hise took over for the large scale experiments. The final thing that I had evolved was a project for looking at the metallic constituents in Chattanooga Shale. Illinois Tech had looked at the possibilities of obtaining oil from the Chattanooga Shale. They were able to obtain oil to the extent of about fifty percent of that which was obtained from the western shales. However, the eastern shales did not present some of the problems that the western shales did, which were never publicized, incidentally. See, the western shales was alkaline, and if that got into the waters of the west, that would ruin the west. Second thing was, their wastes from heating the western shales was much larger, the size of the volume of the wastes was much larger than what they started with, so there was a waste problem. And then you needed energy for heating the western shales, and you didn’t have it there, whereas, as I pointed out in the Chattanooga Shale, we were within five hundred miles of transportation, the eastern shales left a waste which was smaller, because I had MMC do compaction tests on the waste after we had extracted the metallic constituents out, and that was a number one complaint that a close friend of mine pointed out. The first question he asked when I started with that project was, “What are you going to do with the waste if you can’t get rid of it?” I said, “It’ll go right back in there and has much less volume.” And you had water in the east, and the other thing was that the eastern shales did not have the alkali of the western shales. And so the project – we obtained seed money from Dr. Postma to enlarge that project. The Energy Division was studying the social implications, if we started extracting materials from shales in central Tennessee, the shale deposit extended from northern Alabama all the way out into southern Indiana and Ohio, billions of tons. Even though the uranium concentration was only about 65 parts per million, a major reason for studying was the fact that we were importing metals like columbium, and other metals from those shales. The process was worked out, but then in 1982, the Reagan Administration decided not to budget the material for these projects, so we ended up without the Magnetic Separation Project and without the Shale Project, and after being offered short-term projects to studying things for nuclear safety in Washington, I informed my superior Dr. Irving Spiewak of my resignation. I said I wasn’t going to sit behind a desk and twiddle my thumbs, because I knew how they worked in Washington. They wouldn’t make decisions, so the papers would sit there, and I said, “I have better things to do with my mind. I’m not being challenged.” So I resigned. I took a voluntary riff in the late summer of 1982. And for a year or two afterwards, I was involved with Art Fraas, looking at some potential coal problems with PAI. The difficulties of obtaining funding finally eliminated that, so I was full-time retired.
Mr. Kolb: Off on your own. Well, you had a very interesting and illustrious career, I must say that. You had a lot of different challenges, that’s for sure. I know that’s the way the Lab was. Well let’s go back to the WWII era and talk about your living conditions when you came to Oak Ridge. You told us about the living conditions; you were commuting to Knoxville. When you got into Oak Ridge finally and got your first cemesto house and you and Dot were living together there, how did you adapt to all this change of society, all the different people that you met?
Dr. Silverman: We were a very young society. Couples were having babies. We were childless at that time, and we would have block parties in which the liquid refreshment would be imported by Morgan County, the Owl Store, or somehow brought into Oak Ridge without the guards taking away the liquor imports. The shopping in Jackson Square was a mess. The roads were muddy. Ten thousand people milling around in what was then the center of town. We did have the Ridge Theater in Jackson Square. We had one big grocery. On Sunday mornings sometimes you might see a line of people at the Jackson Square Pharmacy, and that line would extend up towards the Chapel on the Hill and you’d say, “What’s that line for?” Well you learned that line was either for cigarettes which had come in or nylon stockings for women.
Mr. Kolb: Both in short supply.
Dr. Silverman: Right. And you know Oak Ridge then was dry. I’m trying to remember. I knew that Knoxville was closed on Sunday as part of the Bible Belt. Movies were not even open on Sundays.
Mr. Kolb: Really?
Dr. Silverman: That’s right. So during our stay in Knoxville for three months, there was nothing to do on a Sunday. Did you ever meet Jack East? He worked with Cas Borkowski in Instruments.
Mr. Kolb: No I didn’t.
Dr. Silverman: He and his wife, we ran into one Sunday in Knoxville. They were living in Knoxville. Jack technically was not – I think he may have had a degree from the University of Chattanooga, but I’m not sure it was in science, and he had married Beulah, who was an east Tennessee girl, and they were looking around for things to do, so we became acquainted with them later. And he was a very sharp Instrument man who helped Borkowski with numerous developments during the wartime. I was trying to remember, too – we had the community, mainly younger people, started the following community: shall I call them projects or arts? In the late fall of 1943, a group of people started what later became the Oak Ridge Playhouse. That was the first arts group that had evolved. In the late fall and then early spring, Dr. Waldo Cohn had formed a string orchestra, which gave its first concert in June of 1944, and later this group added members of the Community Band and the Woodwind Ensemble under John Van Wazer to form the Oak Ridge Symphony, which gave its first full concert in November, 1944. The Oak Ridge Community Band, which had been formed during the ’44 season, gave its first concert on July 4th, 1944. So these three groups essentially started up and formed the basis for the early arts in Oak Ridge. The Oak Ridge Art Center was started about the early 1950s. I think they had started earlier with a group, but they did not have housing or anything. But with the help of Dr. Alexander Holland and his wife, Henrietta, they moved along the Art Center idea to where they had a permanent facility and formed a large group. In fact Alex Zucker was one of the early members of that group. Two ballet groups started in the middle of the ’50s. I gave a short paper on the development of the arts in early Oak Ridge, which was presented in an ORICL course. I have a copy of that.
Mr. Kolb: I think I’ve got a copy of that, actually.
Dr. Silverman: You did? Yeah. And so –
Mr. Kolb: And you were in the Symphony?
Dr. Silverman: Yeah. Dot and I were members of the string group that performed in June of ’44 and later started with the Symphony when it was formed in November of 1944, and we’ve continued with the Symphony. Dot’s development of macular degeneration, which affected her eyes badly, forced her to drop out of the Symphony after the 1995 season, so she had been in the Symphony over fifty years and I have continued and am the lone survivor of the 1944 Symphony. See, it will have its 60th year next year, and it is the – we argue with Knoxville about that – but their symphony was disbanded [during] a couple of years of wartime and we’ve been the longest continuing symphony, although it’s not largely professional.
Mr. Kolb: Very successful.
Dr. Silverman: Right, and so in 1947, Waldo Cohn said since the Symphony is no longer going to be supported by Roane Anderson Company, which is handling the recreation program in the city, said we should get together with the chorus, the orchestra, and set up an organization for handling things like concert arrangements, selling tickets and all that. And so in the fall of ’47, the Oak Ridge Civic Music Association was formed and Dot was one of the five founding members of the board, you see. And so that was the beginnings of the full ORCMA, the full concert program in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Still going on today.
Dr. Silverman: Still going on today, yes.
Mr. Kolb: It’s amazing how it’s really been successful and continuous. Well, that’s one of the things that makes Oak Ridge unique.
Dr. Silverman: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: It��s been a real success. One little question here about, not arts, but you talked about shopping. Did you ever shop with your wife when you were living in Oak Ridge? That is, did you go to Knoxville or Clinton to shop?
Dr. Silverman: Oh yes. Since I still had the B ration card on Monday nights when the stores in Knoxville were open, Miller’s Department Store, we would drive in a group of single people with us to have dinner at Ely���s Steakhouse on Clinch Avenue and then do our shopping at Miller’s or any adjoining stores in Knoxville, and we did a fair amount of helping single people along that line. We also had with us for most of the year a young couple. The husband was in the SED, and they did not have housing, and so they lived with us in the A-house for most of the year. They were from the Boston area and the war ended and they left. Meanwhile some other SED personnel, in order to get housing, went out to Lake City and obtained – yes, it was like a lodge out there and a number of them would commute, you see.
Mr. Kolb: Well, back to shopping, how were you treated by the Knoxville stores?
Dr. Silverman: Oh –
Mr. Kolb: Did they like you?
Dr. Silverman: We were the foreigners from the North. They sort of looked askance at us at times. Who were these strangers, and what were they involved with? Things were –
Mr. Kolb: They could tell you were not from Knoxville, you were –
Dr. Silverman: Oh definitely not. And what for you? What do you want? I’ll put it in a poke, a paper sack.
Mr. Kolb: Your accents gave you away.
Dr. Silverman: At one time we were eating in Regas and the waitress said, “With your baked potato, what will you have?” She said, “I’ll have some butter and some sour cream.” “Ma’am, all our cream is fresh.” And then Dot looks at the wall and sees something that looks like a two-inch cockroach crawling up the wall. So –
Mr. Kolb: So they liked your money, but it was different then.
Dr. Silverman: You know sometimes after a concert we would get together at the Central Cafeteria on Central Avenue just below the Jackson Square area to have coffee or something else. It wasn’t considered any high-class restaurant. In fact, at times, the word ‘pukatorium’ was used.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that’s where I ate breakfast when I came here. It was called the T&C Café, I believe, at that time.
Dr. Silverman: We rode the buses to work and they were really something. Like old cattle cars.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you rode the cattle cars?
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, right. For a while there, for a period there, I sold my car and we didn’t have the use of the car, and I was going to school, so we rode the town buses.
Mr. Kolb: And they came very frequently didn’t they?
Dr. Silverman: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: You could travel all over town.
Dr. Silverman: So there wasn’t really, you made your own entertainment, your own parties, the –
Mr. Kolb: Well were you playing tennis, too, back there? You were a tennis player, I know.
Dr. Silverman: It turns out that a close friend of mine, Roy Towns, later the rival of mine on the tennis court – Roy came to Oak Ridge in late ’43 and was housed in a Broadway Apartment overlooking the Jackson Square Tennis Courts and he watched the construction of Jackson Square Tennis Courts. Later, in the spring, he and I met, and we were the first players out on those courts, and so we became friends. Roy was working at Y-12, I was at X-10, but later, after the war, Roy joined the Laboratory, so he was a member of the Lab tennis team and I was the captain of the Lab tennis team for several years during the latter ’40s and we had teams representing the various plants and the AEC and the Oak Ridge Tennis League.
Mr. Kolb: So the tennis league was formed early on then too?
Dr. Silverman: Yes. It was formed during the war, and during the war we had eight teams. There was an Army team, a Navy team, a team representing the Firkleaf project, which was thermal diffusion. In fact, do you have a background in Chem Engineering?
Mr. Kolb: No.
Dr. Silverman: Dr. Barnett Dodge, the Head of the Yale Chem Engineering Department, under whom I’d been a student, shows up with the Firkleaf tennis team. Short, stocky older man, and the two teams were lined up, and I had – the line-ups were exchanged, and who did he draw? Six-foot-two Cas Borkowski. And Dr. Dodge said to me, “Dr. Silverman, remember, I’m an old man.” Well I had submitted the list and Cas Borkowski proceeded to wipe him out. Anyway, the league operated into the mid ’50s, and then it was decided since Y-12 had been dropped down a much smaller number of employees, they could not field a team. We just went to individual leagues starting like in the mid ’50s, so the Oak Ridge Tennis League evolved into a single person series of leagues after the mid ’50s, and it’s continued until this day.
Mr. Kolb: Well, when I came in ’54 – I joined it in ’55, I think – and I played for quite a while. Yeah it was very successful and it’s still going on. Just like everything else, it’s still going on.
Dr. Silverman: Now during the – I think it was during the ’50s, especially the latter ’50s, early ’60s, I would help coach – a high school coach – help some of the young tennis players for the high school tennis team. And, in fact, we’d frequently be their opponent in the number one tennis league. John Murphy, let’s see, Elden Arnold, Dr. Wayne Sprouse, who later became a dentist and who was the fourth member, oh, and Jody Dunlap, the young player whose mother, Lizz, owns Lizz’s Liquor Store. Jody got electrocuted in a – in fact the high school tennis team consisting of Elden Arnold, John Murphy, Jody Dunlap, and Wayne Sprouse was the one team to win the state title to beat the prep teams, like representing Baylor, McCallie, all the really highly trained kids. And I competed in all the city tournaments. We ran two tournaments. The summer one, usually latter part of June, was – I had the tournament named the Blackshear Tournament after a man named Frank Blackshear who died of a brain tumor, and Frank was one of our most colorful tennis characters. [He’d] play on the courts in bare feet, tummy hanging out, [was] a marvelous chop artist. And he would drive players, his opponents, crazy, and the only way to beat that type of player is to move into the net and overpower them. You see, don’t stay in the backcourt; they’ll drive you crazy. And so the Blackshear Tournament was formed, it was called, in the mid-season tournament, and a tournament usually in September was a closed tournament for city players, whereas the Blackshear was open to the region. We had some very well-known players come out to play in the Blackshear, and I did not win the title in the Blackshear till I reached the senior level at age forty-five, because some of the competition I encountered, like members of the UT tennis team –
Mr. Kolb: Younger, much younger players, yeah that’s right. And then you and Roy Towns became very competitive.
Dr. Silverman: Oh yeah, we became very competitive, a whole series of trophies here in which, in fact if either one had something wrong with them over a period of about ten years there, and Roy is five years my junior, the other person would easily win, but if both of us were in good shape, I usually wore Roy out. We’d be playing in ninety degree temperatures, the latter part of June, and play long three-setters, and I had the stamina. He was carrying some extra weight at that time, so I would wear him out.
Mr. Kolb: Time after time after time, every year is the same old recipe. Well, there’s a few other questions here. How did being in the Secret City with the fences being closed affect you? Of course you’d been told you were working on the atomic bomb project when you came, which was rare. Most people didn’t know what they were working on, but you did.
Dr. Silverman: However, a lot of the young professionals, especially at the Lab, had deduced the fact that we were working on something for a nuclear device because a number of them were graduates of Washington University and Berkley and they had been in a specialized field of Radiation Chemistry, so they certainly deduced the fact that we were involved.
Mr. Kolb: But you weren’t supposed to talk about it.
Dr. Silverman: Oh no, you weren’t supposed to talk about it.
Mr. Kolb: Right.
Dr. Silverman: As a matter of fact, in the summer of ’45, right after the Alamogordo test was run, a petition was sent with a letter from Leo Szilard, who was in Chicago at the time – sent that petition down to the Laboratory for additional signatures, and the Army, boy their hackles were raised. They were up in arms. It didn’t go through channels, and I remember Whitaker, who was Head of the Lab at the time, held a long meeting at which he tried to get people not to sign the petition but wasted about an hour’s time. And so, you know, that petition asked that we demonstrate the bomb on an uninhabited island, you see, not on a population. Well at that time, I’m not sure that the Army was certain even that a second bomb would work. They had tested – the Alamogordo test was a plutonium bomb.
Mr. Kolb: Right, the uranium bomb hadn’t been tested.
Dr. Silverman: No, Hiroshima – we just had enough material for a uranium bomb for Hiroshima, but when the second bomb on Nagasaki was dropped, it was a mile off its target but did much more damage, so from that point on it was plutonium, not uranium.
Mr. Kolb: Did you have a chance to sign this petition?
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, I was trying to think – it happened in ’45. No, a number of us in our division did not sign it. The most backing of it came from the research divisions at that time, not from the engineering divisions.
Mr. Kolb: I just wondered if you had a chance to, yeah.
Dr. Silverman: It came down to Physics and Chemistry.
Mr. Kolb: Well, when the bomb was dropped and the secret was out, things changed rapidly, didn’t it? Of course, in the sense that the secretness was over with right?
Dr. Silverman: Right.
Mr. Kolb: You still lived inside the fence and then on until ’49.
Dr. Silverman: Right.
Mr. Kolb: And how did – did you like the fact that the town opened up in ’49 and guards went away?
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, we certainly didn’t object. You know it was funny, two things, in late ’46, we were on a trip up east to New Haven, and Dot was getting some treatment in an OBGYN in Philadelphia, but then we made a trip to Florida during the vacation period ’47-’48, Christmas/New Year���s thing, we were down in Florida visiting relatives there, when we heard that the reactor work was being transferred to Oregon and that the Pile Group were leaving for Chicago, Rickover’s bunch, and at that time, we didn’t realize that Carbide was going to take over the Laboratory. So when we heard about the Pile thing, I said to Dot, “Oh well, I’m not involved with that.” In fact, I was working on my thesis, and so we said, “So what.” Then we come back and we learn that Carbide is going to take it over, and knowing the background of – that Carbide had been running production plants, not research institutions, and talking with my thesis advisor Dr. John Swartout, who had learned what the conditions were at the K-25 and Y-12, the salaries and everything involved, we were not enthusiastic about Carbide taking over, and a number of, shall we call them, “naughty poems” were written. “We can���t abide with Carbide, [inaudible] the bowels we [inaudible] dreary.”
Mr. Kolb: But it happened anyway, I guess.
Dr. Silverman: But they learned rather quickly – and, in fact, Rucker, who became the Head, he was shrewd enough to realize that you don’t try to make a production plant out of a laboratory which is doing research.
Mr. Kolb: Keep the good people there.
Dr. Silverman: Right.
Mr. Kolb: Well are there any other unique experiences as we wind things down here that you want to record.
Dr. Silverman: Well, in the end of the tennis business, in 1990, I was selected by the Oak Ridge Sports Hall of Fame as the first tennis player.
Mr. Kolb: The first one.
Dr. Silverman: Yes, that they inducted. At the same time I was inducted with Dr. John Crews in swimming, Don Bordinger for football, and I’m trying to remember who the fourth one was [Emory Hale] – a group of four of us at that time were inducted. And the unique thing was that I obtained my highest national ranking. That September, I was playing in the national 75-and-over Tournament [in] North Carolina and I won four out of five matches. The only one I lost was to the winner of the tournament, the national champ. But I won the consolation bracket, and so I obtained a number 28th in the nation in the 75-and-over age group. And then my partner and I were ranked number thirteen in doubles nationally.
Mr. Kolb: Who was your partner?
Dr. Silverman: William Foster from Knoxville, who died seven years ago of Alzheimer’s. Jim, there is an article, a big article that Mike Cates wrote about our background, and it was tied in with something here. I can show you that on the wall.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I’ll look at it. You had an illustrious tennis career, almost maybe more so than your work career. That was a double dose of success. Well I know that the arts have been important to you and you and your wife have contributed a lot there and it’s been an amazing town we created and you were instrumental there. Well, I’ll look forward to talking to your wife, then, another day, and that’ll be great. Thank you, Mike.
Dr. Silverman: Okay.
[end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF MEYER D. SILVERMAN, PH.D.
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
October 2, 2003
[Side A]
Mr. Kolb: Mike, let’s get started first by asking you how and why you first came to Oak Ridge, okay?
Dr. Silverman: Yes, we arrived in Oak Ridge in the middle of December, 1943 via Chicago. I had been hired to work on the Manhattan Project, and we arrived in Chicago a month earlier. Upon my arrival, Dr. [James] Franck, Director of the Chemistry Division said, “You do not have to ask anybody what this project’s all about. We’re out to make an atomic bomb.”
Mr. Kolb: He told you that?
Dr. Silverman: “Now go into the library and bring yourself up in this field.” A month later, he said that I was a free agent and should look around to where I wanted to work, because the slurry type of reactor for which they had hired me was not going to be pursued because it would be a long term project, and we did not have that time since the Germans were already working in atomic energy. So we arrived – so after talking to the various section heads in the Chemistry Division in Chicago, I could have worked for Seaborg or Coriell or George Boyd. The director and research director of Clinton Labs, the forerunner of ORNL, they were interviewing people and trying to induce them to come down to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Who was that Research Director?
Dr. Silverman: The Research Director was Richard Doan and the Director was M. D. Whitaker, a former student of Dr. Karl Compton. They also wanted to know what Dorothy, my wife, was doing and whether we had a family. Upon learning that she had been a secretary to patent attorneys at RCA before we went to Chicago, Doan turned to Whitaker and said, “Hire this man; don’t let him out of your sight.” So we came to Oak Ridge in December ’43, were housed at the Andrew Johnson in Knoxville for a week to ten days, by which time things became a bit boring. The housing that was offered to us was dormitory housing with separate women’s and men’s dormitories. We declined, and so we obtained an apartment – well, actually, not quite an apartment, a master bedroom and bath with a TVA Economist in the Island Home section of Knoxville. Since I had been working on important projects at the Permutit Water Conditioning Company prior to going to Chicago, I had a B ration card for my automobile.
Mr. Kolb: Gasoline.
Dr. Silverman: And, as a result, was able to drive from Knoxville to Oak Ridge, so we drove a car pool for a couple of months from Knoxville to Oak Ridge. Up at 6:00, pick your passengers up at 6:30 in the morning, drive to the Laboratory, eat breakfast at “O’Dell’s Ptomaine Café” on the Lab’s grounds, the cafeteria, leave the Lab after 4:30, get back into Knoxville, have dinner, and get back to the room about 8:00 p.m. And that went on for six days a week.
Mr. Kolb: Was your wife working then, too?
Dr. Silverman: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Dr. Silverman: Dot started working immediately for Dr. Isadore Perlman. Perlman was Seaborg’s right-hand man and they had split Seaborg’s section in half. One half remained in Chicago under Seaborg, the other half went down to Oak Ridge under Perlman where the plutonium separation from uranium was being done. So two months later in February of 1944, we were offered a flattop somewhere on Alger Road. Examined the house �� there was like a two to three inch separation in the floor of the living room. You could see the ground below. It had a potbelly stove. So we declined and were able to obtain an “A” cemesto at 107 Kingfisher Lane in the latter part of March 1944. Meanwhile, sometime during February of ’44, I was invited down to Fort Oglethorpe along with about fifteen hundred other potential draftees. I had received greetings. However, within three to five days – I can’t recall – of the notice that I was to be drafted, the project had taken steps to –
Mr. Kolb: Exempt you.
Dr. Silverman: – exempt me. At that time, I had reached my twenty-ninth birthday, so I was not in the under-twenty-six category. A close friend of ours, John Boyle, who was working next to me, was drafted into the Army and returned to the Laboratory at fifty dollars a month instead of – probably his former salary might have two hundred dollars a month.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, big drop.
Dr. Silverman: So, in Oak Ridge at the Laboratory, I was in the Technical Division under Dr. Miles Levert, and our Section Head was Dr. John Huffman, H-U-F-F-M-A-N, a former professor at NYU who had worked with Dr. Harold Urey on isotope separation, who had obtained his Ph.D. from Yale in ’32 and had won the bronze in the saber of the Olympics. Well, I was in the Technical Division and in the section that was looking at future designs for separating the uranium from the wastes engendered by the bismuth phosphate separation process for getting plutonium from uranium. A hundred tons of uranium had been pushed out of the graphite reactor and processed, a third of a ton per day, and we obtained a third of a gram of plutonium per day. That plutonium, we shipped to Los Alamos and some to Washington, some to Chicago for further testing to find its properties and how they would handle those with respect to a nuclear device. We came up with a final process for the separation of uranium from the waste in the spring of ’45. I had a done a sizeable amount of lab work in a borrowed lab up near the graphite reactor in which I had looked at various solvents for extracting the uranium from the wastes. In fact, Jim Lane and I were involved and Jim had said, “Mike, why don’t you do the lab work. I’m a lousy lab man; you’re real good. I’ll look at the calculations, what we have to do.” So we did that and when we came up with a design and drawings were made for equipment in the various cells of 3019, we went to Dr. Levert and said, “Look, we’ve got this process laid out for extracting the uranium from the wastes.” We had developed a process design which involved a solvent extraction column, and Dr. Levert objected to our using a column process because he felt that all our eggs were in one basket, and if something happened in the cell and we couldn’t get in there, we’d be stuck. Solvent extraction had been used in the petroleum industry but not to the extent that we were envisioning. He suggested that a design should encompass a series of mixer settler tanks in each of the various separation cells, so if something happened in one cell, we would move to the next, continue with the process. However, when the design was practically complete, the Army said, “We don’t need that uranium; forget about the process.” They were hauling in pitchblende from the Belgian Congo, so they felt there was no shortage of uranium. As it turned out, this decision was not a fortunate one for the Lab. Ten years later, Dr. Willis Baldwin in the Chemistry and then in Chemical Technology Division came to me and explained that the waste tanks on the upper level were being filled and we had to do something about making more room for additional waste from the RaLa process and other things going on at the Laboratory and I told him the best bet at that time was to precipitate the uranium out of the waste, probably as a peroxide. So I assumed that was done.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Dr. Silverman: Ten years later, Willis came over and said, “We have taken off some of the supernatant liquids in the tanks, but we’re still in need of more room. What do we do now?” I says, “You’ve probably got a heavy precipitate at the bottom of these tanks, and it may have hardened somewhat. I think you’re going to have to get a sump pump down in those tanks and some method of heating the liquid to slurry out the uranium. I assumed that they did something similar, and years later a small semi-pilot process was set up at the foot of the road which led from the east part of the Laboratory and the walkway led down past the lower tanks and you then took a right turn to go up to the Cafeteria and the 3019 building. Well, the lower waste tanks were used for lesser active wastes, see, so a small pilot – oh there was a, I forget the exact equipment, but it was placed in that area, and they proceeded to start processing that waste.
Mr. Kolb: This was up in the ’60s or ’70s by then?
Dr. Silverman: Uh, yeah. Yes. Well when Willis came the first time, it was in the ’50s, then in the ’60s. Meanwhile, we had been doing a lot of RaLa processing for Los Alamos, Radio Lanthanum, which was used as a detector during the bomb tests. Here’s an interesting anecdote regarding the wastes. We would walk from 706A and later the 4500 building past those lower waste tanks, and you could smell degraded solvent odors from the lower waste tanks. What we learned was that at Chicago they were working on a hexone process using hexone as a solvent for the solvent extraction process separation, and with no waste facilities at Oregon, they were shipping down nonactive wastes or very little – just containing uranium – to the Laboratory in steel drums. Well the hexone was degraded by nitric acid, which was being used as an additive to help the extraction, and so you could smell things like aldehydes, butyric acid, and we would casually remark, “We’ve just walked by the skunk works.” At that time, a well-known comic strip by Al Capp, Li’l Abner, discussed the fact that Dogpatch was involved with “skonk works.” [Editor’s note: The spelling of “skonk” is the actual eye-dialect spelling from the comic strip.]
Mr. Kolb: So that’s where you got the skunk works, yeah, I see. That’s interesting.
Dr. Silverman: Well, since the design project for separating uranium from the waste was terminated by an Army decision, I went on to some other work and in the summer of ’45, I believe it was, Dr. Boarts, B-O-A-R-T-S, Head of the Chem Engineering Department at the University of Tennessee, started offering a course in heat transfer in the field of Chemical Engineering in Oak Ridge. I took that course. A year later, the University decided that they were going to start a Ph.D. program in Chemistry. Two organic majors working with Dr. Hilton Smith were the first two graduate student involved in a Ph.D. program at the University. I had asked about a Ph.D. in Chem Engineering, but I was informed only the Chemistry Program was being started, and so a year later, in the summer of ’46, after Dr. Huffman had given me a large raise and asked me why I wanted to do a Ph.D., I said, “Well, I can’t give you a direct answer now, but I think it might come in very handy in the future.����� And so I started on the Ph.D. program in Chemistry in the fall of ’46. My Bachelor’s Degree obtained at Yale University in 1934 was followed by a Master’s in Chemistry in 1942 at George Washington University. So I was, shall we say, groomed for a Ph.D. course in Physical Chemistry. I wanted to take my minor in Chem Engineering, but Dr. Boarts said, “No, you’re not going to get off easy. I’m not going to let you do it. Either you do it in math or physics.” So I ended up sitting in on a math course under Dr. Fred Ficken at K-25, and decided after one semester that that was not the math I needed for Chem Engineering purposes. It was more mathematician’s mathematics or abstract. So I decided to do the minor in physics, and I took courses under Dr. Wilford Good in an atomic physics laboratory and in a lecture course on, I would say, atomic and molecular physics, by Dr. Dick Present, who had left the Laboratory to become a full-time professor of physics at the University. So those two courses were my minor. Meanwhile, in order to complete a residency the ’46-’47 year, I commuted from Oak Ridge to Knoxville and took requisite courses in Chemistry, passed a German language exam with no problems, and it had been agreed before I started the Ph.D. program that if I passed my prelims for the doctorate degree that I would then transfer from the Technical Division to the Chemistry Division and do my thesis in the Chemistry Division. I had obtained permission for the academic ’46-’47 year leave from the Labs from Dr. Eugene Wigner who was Director of Research at the Laboratory during that period.
Mr. Kolb: So you were a full-time student at that time?
Dr. Silverman: Yes, I was a full-time student during ’46-’47 year and Mrs. Silverman, who had left her job at the end of the war, went back to work and worked for Dr. Waldo Cohn to support us during that year. When I passed my prelims in October of ’47, I told her she didn’t have to work any longer. I was going to be paid for doing my thesis and I had transferred to the Chemistry Division. My thesis was studying the upper valence states of ruthenium, one of the major fission products, which presented lots of problems during the separation processes that had been evolved and used. We had worked out the transition problems involved between doing a thesis at the Laboratory as compared to doing one at the University and the university students were quite surprised when, upon completion of the thesis, I gave a seminar, and learned how much had been accomplished during the ’47-1950 period, because universities lacked the advanced equipment that the Laboratory had, facilities and all, and so from the fall of ’47 till 1949, my group leader, who was Dr. John Swartout, who became Associate Director, first of the Chemistry Division, then Chemistry Division Director. When he became Chemistry Division Director, he said, “Mike, I’m not going to have the time to follow your thesis work. I think that you should be under another professor,��� and Dr. Henri Levy, who had been giving courses in chemistry for the UT department – but the courses were being given in Oak Ridge – so John suggested I complete the thesis under Dr. Henri Levy, and the final year of the thesis I worked under Dr. Henri Levy. We completed a crystal structure of potassium perruthenate with the aid of Friden calculators before the days of the computer. And we filled a hutment with lots of paper and the fire department said to us, “You’re a fire hazard. You better clean it up.”
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I bet. Was this in the Lab, the hutment?
Dr. Silverman: Yes. It was outside of 706A, where I had done all my lab work for the degree. So that work was completed, and I was then a member of the Chemistry Division under John Swartout.
Mr. Kolb: So you were one of the first, really, graduates of the program.
Dr. Silverman: I was the first Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Oak Ridge. Ken Neville, who had also come onto the program with me, was an organic chemist and finished up his doctorate several months earlier in Organic Chemistry. Actually, I was probably, I believe I was the eighth Ph.D. in chemistry from the UT department, because a number of veterans had come out of the service at the end of the war, and they started their work in ’46 and graduated during the ’49-’50 year. I was awarded my doctorate in August of 1950, and along with me were three other Ph.D.s, the first in education, the first in mathematics, and the first in physics. So there were four of us who obtained our Ph.D. in August of 1950 at the university.
Mr. Kolb: Very good. Well, that got you through the wartime period at least and you got your doctorate degree. That’s great.
Dr. Silverman: Well, during the coming year, during the year ’50-’51 the Laboratory had started preliminary work on the Homogeneous Reactor Project and Dr. Swartout had suggested to me upon completion of the Ph.D. work that, with my chemical engineering background, I ought to look into the possibilities of working in the Chemical Technology Division along with what I might want to do in Chemistry. He pointed out, “You are thirty-five years of age, so you’re ten years older than the average young Ph.D. in the Chemistry Division,” and they had hired eight to ten young Ph.D.s in 1949. I remembered that Dr. Ray Stoughton had gone on a recruiting trip and recruited a number of these young Ph.D.s and had ended up with the disease Polio.
Mr. Kolb: Ray Stoughton got Polio?
Dr. Silverman: Yes, Ray Stoughton came down with Polio as a result of that probably long-term recruiting trip. So I told Dr. Swartout that I did not receive a satisfactory answer from the Director of the Chemical Technology Division, who at that time was Dr. Frank Staley, and that I would continue in the Chemistry Division as a small stone in a bigger pond. I had considered working with Dr. Ralph Brosey in a radiochemical field, but Dr. Swartout also asked me whether I would like to work on the Homogeneous Reactor Project. He said, ��You have a unique background and it�����s going to be very helpful to us on the project.” And my answer to him was, “Well I owe the Laboratory something for having me helped achieve the Ph.D.” So I, the ensuing year, worked on radiation corrosion studies. We would irradiate various ampoules in the Graphite Reactor and examine specimens to see what was happening to those specimens since they were encased in the uranium sulfate solution. Uniquely, one time John Boyle and I were up at the top of the Graphite Reactor. We had set up a brick barrier and had been lowering our samples down into a hole via a pulley arrangement, and we were examining – we would see what was going down there by having a mirror tilted at an angle. One day, Dr. Everitt Blizard of the Physics Division came by and said, “Do you guys know what you’re doing?” He said, “You don’t realize it, but those neutrons are bouncing off that silver mirror, and you’re going to get exposed.” We did something slightly different after that.
Mr. Kolb: You didn’t have any monitors there to check your radiation?
Dr. Silverman: Well, we had the usual badges, but –
Mr. Kolb: I mean survey people. Survey people were not involved?
Dr. Silverman: No, we didn’t. Anyway, I continued working on radiation corrosion problems. Meanwhile, I had also started doing some kinetics work on the decomposition of uranium peroxide in uranyl sulfate solutions using various catalytic species. In the summer of ’53, Dr. George Watson, on leave from the University of Texas under the ORAU program, worked with me that summer doing additional kinetics. He explained that he had not done much lab work and he enjoyed learning the techniques I was using. We were able to inveigle a conductance bridge from Dr. Kurt Kraus of the Chemistry Division. With the aid of that bridge, we were able to study the kinetics in a more detailed fashion, the result of which was three publications on the kinetics involved in uranium and uranyl sulfate solutions. Shortly after that work was completed, Sam Beall who was in charge of the Homogeneous Reactor during its early period, one day called me and said, “Mike, we’re in trouble. We’re getting power surges, like bumping and other things involved in the reactor.”
Mr. Kolb: This is during the HRE operation?
Dr. Silverman: Right, the Homogenous Reactor Experiment. He said, “We don’t know what’s happening, but we can’t explain.” I said, “I think you have some precipitation of the uranium as the peroxide.” I went over to the reactor and although there were two chemists there – Ed Bowlman and Dr. Compier were there – they apparently could not fathom what was going on, or were not enthusiastic about examining solutions. I was able to obtain a sample of the reactor material, ran a spectrophotometric test on the thing, and told Sam Beall, “You do have uranium being precipitated out as the peroxide.” I said, “What’s happening is the radiation is decomposing water, forming hydrogen and oxygen. The uranium is reacting in solution to form the peroxide.” With the aid of the experiments that Dr. Watson and I had performed during the previous summer, I was able to tell Sam that by raising the temperature to a certain point, that we would decompose the peroxide thermally, and after it would dissolve, we then could handle the solution and we would get rid of the bumping. I had laid out a diagram or a plot of the formation of uranium peroxide as a function of the radiation level, how fast the peroxide would form in solution, and the other curve showed the decomposition as a function of temperature. Sam followed that graph and was able to put the reactor back without any further problems.
Mr. Kolb: Well, that was a very important discovery.
Dr. Silverman: So I worked on several other radiation corrosion problems. One had to do with the metal walls which were exposed to radiation in combination with the uranyl sulfate high temperature solutions, and so I worked on several allied projects. And from 1955 to ’57, I worked on these projects separately and this work continued until the latter ’50s when the Homogeneous Reactor Experiment was terminated. I won’t go into detail. Several of them were completed, and one interesting facet of this work was that Sam Beall pointed out that they had detected in the reactor cell leakage of gases from the reactor and he was worried about a fire. It actually had to do with the secondary coolant, where they ran into the problem, and Sam called up and I said, “Well,” I suddenly had a bright idea, I said, “Look, lay your hands on every nitrogen cylinder that you can get on the grounds and just keep flooding that cell with the nitrogen. [If] you don’t have any oxygen, you won’t have a fire until you can shut down the reactor.” And so he did that. Sam was ever thankful for the advice I’d given him during the ’50’s, for in the latter ’60’s, when I was leaving the Reactor Chemistry Division, Sam Beall offered me a position in the Reactor Division. Anyway, to continue with, I��ll summarize –
[Side B]
Mr. Kolb: So to summarize, you say –
Dr. Silverman: In 1960, the Reactor Chemistry Division was formed, the remains of a division that had been at Y-12 working on uranium problems, and the chemists [who] had been involved with the zirconium studies and allied projects at Y-12, they were brought over to X-10, and Dr. Taylor, who was Head of the Chemistry Division at that time transferred a number of us from Chemistry into the newly formed Reactor Chemistry Division, at that time under Warren Grimes. Dr. Taylor used this to, shall we say, get rid of those people in the Chemistry Division who he felt weren’t fulfilling his desires.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, yeah, whatever.
Dr. Silverman: Well I know because I had asked about what the criteria were. When Dr. Watson and I completed the work on all the kinetics for the HRE and all, I asked him, “Dr. Taylor, what were the criteria within the Chemistry Division for advancement? When did you obtain a raise, permission to go to scientific meetings, get elevated to be a group leader?” And I was not given a satisfactory answer to these questions. In fact, I came away with the impression that I was being a troublemaker by asking these questions of an administrator. A number of people came away with a similar impression; they ended up in Reactor Chemistry. Anyway, so I worked in Reactor Chemistry on some solution chemistry, then later on the Nuclear Safety Project studying fiber filtration and came up with a very unique solution to a problem involving how to study the movement of the radioactive particles on fibrous filters, and that ended up in a publication in the journal Science. In fact, the paper was submitted over the objections of Mr. Grimes. And George Watson, who had joined the Laboratory previously, indicated that Grimes might not like the way the paper was written, but scientifically the facts were there and they were correct. So after three months of arguing, the paper was accepted by the editor of Science and published within three weeks. I had a personal call from him. His name was Phil Abelson. Philip Abelson was editor of the magazine Science, and he said, “This is an important paper. I have a couple suggestions to make, to add to the paper, and we’ll publish it as soon as possible.” So it appeared in three weeks.
Mr. Kolb: Well, good. Well, the locals didn’t always appreciate –
Dr. Silverman: That’s right. And the technique was used in the nuclear safety pilot plant for studying the effects of fission product trapping. And in 1968, I was made an offer by Sam Beall, so I transferred from the Reactor Chemistry Division to the Reactor Division, worked a year with Steve Kaplan and Ed Nephew on the nuclear safety information business and then took charge of a project studying fission product transport in a loop at Y-12. And later, in the Reactor Division, did work on – in the summer of ’73, went on loan to what was later to become the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, at that time – I think it was earlier – to look at problems associated with water cooled reactors, which were being pushed at that time, and was there for a year and a half on loan. Then Gordon Fee asked that I come back to help him in Oak Ridge. So we came back in the fall ’74, started to work on loops involved for the Molten Salt, but that project was killed a year later when we were building new loops for studying heat transport and did calculations for a while on heat transfer involving those type of molten salt solutions, and then worked on coal problems in – that was during the ’78 period – developed the process for separating pyrites from coal by magnetic means. I did the basic lab work and later Gene Hise took over for the large scale experiments. The final thing that I had evolved was a project for looking at the metallic constituents in Chattanooga Shale. Illinois Tech had looked at the possibilities of obtaining oil from the Chattanooga Shale. They were able to obtain oil to the extent of about fifty percent of that which was obtained from the western shales. However, the eastern shales did not present some of the problems that the western shales did, which were never publicized, incidentally. See, the western shales was alkaline, and if that got into the waters of the west, that would ruin the west. Second thing was, their wastes from heating the western shales was much larger, the size of the volume of the wastes was much larger than what they started with, so there was a waste problem. And then you needed energy for heating the western shales, and you didn’t have it there, whereas, as I pointed out in the Chattanooga Shale, we were within five hundred miles of transportation, the eastern shales left a waste which was smaller, because I had MMC do compaction tests on the waste after we had extracted the metallic constituents out, and that was a number one complaint that a close friend of mine pointed out. The first question he asked when I started with that project was, “What are you going to do with the waste if you can’t get rid of it?” I said, “It’ll go right back in there and has much less volume.” And you had water in the east, and the other thing was that the eastern shales did not have the alkali of the western shales. And so the project – we obtained seed money from Dr. Postma to enlarge that project. The Energy Division was studying the social implications, if we started extracting materials from shales in central Tennessee, the shale deposit extended from northern Alabama all the way out into southern Indiana and Ohio, billions of tons. Even though the uranium concentration was only about 65 parts per million, a major reason for studying was the fact that we were importing metals like columbium, and other metals from those shales. The process was worked out, but then in 1982, the Reagan Administration decided not to budget the material for these projects, so we ended up without the Magnetic Separation Project and without the Shale Project, and after being offered short-term projects to studying things for nuclear safety in Washington, I informed my superior Dr. Irving Spiewak of my resignation. I said I wasn’t going to sit behind a desk and twiddle my thumbs, because I knew how they worked in Washington. They wouldn’t make decisions, so the papers would sit there, and I said, “I have better things to do with my mind. I’m not being challenged.” So I resigned. I took a voluntary riff in the late summer of 1982. And for a year or two afterwards, I was involved with Art Fraas, looking at some potential coal problems with PAI. The difficulties of obtaining funding finally eliminated that, so I was full-time retired.
Mr. Kolb: Off on your own. Well, you had a very interesting and illustrious career, I must say that. You had a lot of different challenges, that’s for sure. I know that’s the way the Lab was. Well let’s go back to the WWII era and talk about your living conditions when you came to Oak Ridge. You told us about the living conditions; you were commuting to Knoxville. When you got into Oak Ridge finally and got your first cemesto house and you and Dot were living together there, how did you adapt to all this change of society, all the different people that you met?
Dr. Silverman: We were a very young society. Couples were having babies. We were childless at that time, and we would have block parties in which the liquid refreshment would be imported by Morgan County, the Owl Store, or somehow brought into Oak Ridge without the guards taking away the liquor imports. The shopping in Jackson Square was a mess. The roads were muddy. Ten thousand people milling around in what was then the center of town. We did have the Ridge Theater in Jackson Square. We had one big grocery. On Sunday mornings sometimes you might see a line of people at the Jackson Square Pharmacy, and that line would extend up towards the Chapel on the Hill and you’d say, “What’s that line for?” Well you learned that line was either for cigarettes which had come in or nylon stockings for women.
Mr. Kolb: Both in short supply.
Dr. Silverman: Right. And you know Oak Ridge then was dry. I’m trying to remember. I knew that Knoxville was closed on Sunday as part of the Bible Belt. Movies were not even open on Sundays.
Mr. Kolb: Really?
Dr. Silverman: That’s right. So during our stay in Knoxville for three months, there was nothing to do on a Sunday. Did you ever meet Jack East? He worked with Cas Borkowski in Instruments.
Mr. Kolb: No I didn’t.
Dr. Silverman: He and his wife, we ran into one Sunday in Knoxville. They were living in Knoxville. Jack technically was not – I think he may have had a degree from the University of Chattanooga, but I’m not sure it was in science, and he had married Beulah, who was an east Tennessee girl, and they were looking around for things to do, so we became acquainted with them later. And he was a very sharp Instrument man who helped Borkowski with numerous developments during the wartime. I was trying to remember, too – we had the community, mainly younger people, started the following community: shall I call them projects or arts? In the late fall of 1943, a group of people started what later became the Oak Ridge Playhouse. That was the first arts group that had evolved. In the late fall and then early spring, Dr. Waldo Cohn had formed a string orchestra, which gave its first concert in June of 1944, and later this group added members of the Community Band and the Woodwind Ensemble under John Van Wazer to form the Oak Ridge Symphony, which gave its first full concert in November, 1944. The Oak Ridge Community Band, which had been formed during the ’44 season, gave its first concert on July 4th, 1944. So these three groups essentially started up and formed the basis for the early arts in Oak Ridge. The Oak Ridge Art Center was started about the early 1950s. I think they had started earlier with a group, but they did not have housing or anything. But with the help of Dr. Alexander Holland and his wife, Henrietta, they moved along the Art Center idea to where they had a permanent facility and formed a large group. In fact Alex Zucker was one of the early members of that group. Two ballet groups started in the middle of the ’50s. I gave a short paper on the development of the arts in early Oak Ridge, which was presented in an ORICL course. I have a copy of that.
Mr. Kolb: I think I’ve got a copy of that, actually.
Dr. Silverman: You did? Yeah. And so –
Mr. Kolb: And you were in the Symphony?
Dr. Silverman: Yeah. Dot and I were members of the string group that performed in June of ’44 and later started with the Symphony when it was formed in November of 1944, and we’ve continued with the Symphony. Dot’s development of macular degeneration, which affected her eyes badly, forced her to drop out of the Symphony after the 1995 season, so she had been in the Symphony over fifty years and I have continued and am the lone survivor of the 1944 Symphony. See, it will have its 60th year next year, and it is the – we argue with Knoxville about that – but their symphony was disbanded [during] a couple of years of wartime and we’ve been the longest continuing symphony, although it’s not largely professional.
Mr. Kolb: Very successful.
Dr. Silverman: Right, and so in 1947, Waldo Cohn said since the Symphony is no longer going to be supported by Roane Anderson Company, which is handling the recreation program in the city, said we should get together with the chorus, the orchestra, and set up an organization for handling things like concert arrangements, selling tickets and all that. And so in the fall of ’47, the Oak Ridge Civic Music Association was formed and Dot was one of the five founding members of the board, you see. And so that was the beginnings of the full ORCMA, the full concert program in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Still going on today.
Dr. Silverman: Still going on today, yes.
Mr. Kolb: It’s amazing how it’s really been successful and continuous. Well, that’s one of the things that makes Oak Ridge unique.
Dr. Silverman: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: It��s been a real success. One little question here about, not arts, but you talked about shopping. Did you ever shop with your wife when you were living in Oak Ridge? That is, did you go to Knoxville or Clinton to shop?
Dr. Silverman: Oh yes. Since I still had the B ration card on Monday nights when the stores in Knoxville were open, Miller’s Department Store, we would drive in a group of single people with us to have dinner at Ely���s Steakhouse on Clinch Avenue and then do our shopping at Miller’s or any adjoining stores in Knoxville, and we did a fair amount of helping single people along that line. We also had with us for most of the year a young couple. The husband was in the SED, and they did not have housing, and so they lived with us in the A-house for most of the year. They were from the Boston area and the war ended and they left. Meanwhile some other SED personnel, in order to get housing, went out to Lake City and obtained – yes, it was like a lodge out there and a number of them would commute, you see.
Mr. Kolb: Well, back to shopping, how were you treated by the Knoxville stores?
Dr. Silverman: Oh –
Mr. Kolb: Did they like you?
Dr. Silverman: We were the foreigners from the North. They sort of looked askance at us at times. Who were these strangers, and what were they involved with? Things were –
Mr. Kolb: They could tell you were not from Knoxville, you were –
Dr. Silverman: Oh definitely not. And what for you? What do you want? I’ll put it in a poke, a paper sack.
Mr. Kolb: Your accents gave you away.
Dr. Silverman: At one time we were eating in Regas and the waitress said, “With your baked potato, what will you have?” She said, “I’ll have some butter and some sour cream.” “Ma’am, all our cream is fresh.” And then Dot looks at the wall and sees something that looks like a two-inch cockroach crawling up the wall. So –
Mr. Kolb: So they liked your money, but it was different then.
Dr. Silverman: You know sometimes after a concert we would get together at the Central Cafeteria on Central Avenue just below the Jackson Square area to have coffee or something else. It wasn’t considered any high-class restaurant. In fact, at times, the word ‘pukatorium’ was used.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, that’s where I ate breakfast when I came here. It was called the T&C Café, I believe, at that time.
Dr. Silverman: We rode the buses to work and they were really something. Like old cattle cars.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you rode the cattle cars?
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, right. For a while there, for a period there, I sold my car and we didn’t have the use of the car, and I was going to school, so we rode the town buses.
Mr. Kolb: And they came very frequently didn’t they?
Dr. Silverman: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: You could travel all over town.
Dr. Silverman: So there wasn’t really, you made your own entertainment, your own parties, the –
Mr. Kolb: Well were you playing tennis, too, back there? You were a tennis player, I know.
Dr. Silverman: It turns out that a close friend of mine, Roy Towns, later the rival of mine on the tennis court – Roy came to Oak Ridge in late ’43 and was housed in a Broadway Apartment overlooking the Jackson Square Tennis Courts and he watched the construction of Jackson Square Tennis Courts. Later, in the spring, he and I met, and we were the first players out on those courts, and so we became friends. Roy was working at Y-12, I was at X-10, but later, after the war, Roy joined the Laboratory, so he was a member of the Lab tennis team and I was the captain of the Lab tennis team for several years during the latter ’40s and we had teams representing the various plants and the AEC and the Oak Ridge Tennis League.
Mr. Kolb: So the tennis league was formed early on then too?
Dr. Silverman: Yes. It was formed during the war, and during the war we had eight teams. There was an Army team, a Navy team, a team representing the Firkleaf project, which was thermal diffusion. In fact, do you have a background in Chem Engineering?
Mr. Kolb: No.
Dr. Silverman: Dr. Barnett Dodge, the Head of the Yale Chem Engineering Department, under whom I’d been a student, shows up with the Firkleaf tennis team. Short, stocky older man, and the two teams were lined up, and I had – the line-ups were exchanged, and who did he draw? Six-foot-two Cas Borkowski. And Dr. Dodge said to me, “Dr. Silverman, remember, I’m an old man.” Well I had submitted the list and Cas Borkowski proceeded to wipe him out. Anyway, the league operated into the mid ’50s, and then it was decided since Y-12 had been dropped down a much smaller number of employees, they could not field a team. We just went to individual leagues starting like in the mid ’50s, so the Oak Ridge Tennis League evolved into a single person series of leagues after the mid ’50s, and it’s continued until this day.
Mr. Kolb: Well, when I came in ’54 – I joined it in ’55, I think – and I played for quite a while. Yeah it was very successful and it’s still going on. Just like everything else, it’s still going on.
Dr. Silverman: Now during the – I think it was during the ’50s, especially the latter ’50s, early ’60s, I would help coach – a high school coach – help some of the young tennis players for the high school tennis team. And, in fact, we’d frequently be their opponent in the number one tennis league. John Murphy, let’s see, Elden Arnold, Dr. Wayne Sprouse, who later became a dentist and who was the fourth member, oh, and Jody Dunlap, the young player whose mother, Lizz, owns Lizz’s Liquor Store. Jody got electrocuted in a – in fact the high school tennis team consisting of Elden Arnold, John Murphy, Jody Dunlap, and Wayne Sprouse was the one team to win the state title to beat the prep teams, like representing Baylor, McCallie, all the really highly trained kids. And I competed in all the city tournaments. We ran two tournaments. The summer one, usually latter part of June, was – I had the tournament named the Blackshear Tournament after a man named Frank Blackshear who died of a brain tumor, and Frank was one of our most colorful tennis characters. [He’d] play on the courts in bare feet, tummy hanging out, [was] a marvelous chop artist. And he would drive players, his opponents, crazy, and the only way to beat that type of player is to move into the net and overpower them. You see, don’t stay in the backcourt; they’ll drive you crazy. And so the Blackshear Tournament was formed, it was called, in the mid-season tournament, and a tournament usually in September was a closed tournament for city players, whereas the Blackshear was open to the region. We had some very well-known players come out to play in the Blackshear, and I did not win the title in the Blackshear till I reached the senior level at age forty-five, because some of the competition I encountered, like members of the UT tennis team –
Mr. Kolb: Younger, much younger players, yeah that’s right. And then you and Roy Towns became very competitive.
Dr. Silverman: Oh yeah, we became very competitive, a whole series of trophies here in which, in fact if either one had something wrong with them over a period of about ten years there, and Roy is five years my junior, the other person would easily win, but if both of us were in good shape, I usually wore Roy out. We’d be playing in ninety degree temperatures, the latter part of June, and play long three-setters, and I had the stamina. He was carrying some extra weight at that time, so I would wear him out.
Mr. Kolb: Time after time after time, every year is the same old recipe. Well, there’s a few other questions here. How did being in the Secret City with the fences being closed affect you? Of course you’d been told you were working on the atomic bomb project when you came, which was rare. Most people didn’t know what they were working on, but you did.
Dr. Silverman: However, a lot of the young professionals, especially at the Lab, had deduced the fact that we were working on something for a nuclear device because a number of them were graduates of Washington University and Berkley and they had been in a specialized field of Radiation Chemistry, so they certainly deduced the fact that we were involved.
Mr. Kolb: But you weren’t supposed to talk about it.
Dr. Silverman: Oh no, you weren’t supposed to talk about it.
Mr. Kolb: Right.
Dr. Silverman: As a matter of fact, in the summer of ’45, right after the Alamogordo test was run, a petition was sent with a letter from Leo Szilard, who was in Chicago at the time – sent that petition down to the Laboratory for additional signatures, and the Army, boy their hackles were raised. They were up in arms. It didn’t go through channels, and I remember Whitaker, who was Head of the Lab at the time, held a long meeting at which he tried to get people not to sign the petition but wasted about an hour’s time. And so, you know, that petition asked that we demonstrate the bomb on an uninhabited island, you see, not on a population. Well at that time, I’m not sure that the Army was certain even that a second bomb would work. They had tested – the Alamogordo test was a plutonium bomb.
Mr. Kolb: Right, the uranium bomb hadn’t been tested.
Dr. Silverman: No, Hiroshima – we just had enough material for a uranium bomb for Hiroshima, but when the second bomb on Nagasaki was dropped, it was a mile off its target but did much more damage, so from that point on it was plutonium, not uranium.
Mr. Kolb: Did you have a chance to sign this petition?
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, I was trying to think – it happened in ’45. No, a number of us in our division did not sign it. The most backing of it came from the research divisions at that time, not from the engineering divisions.
Mr. Kolb: I just wondered if you had a chance to, yeah.
Dr. Silverman: It came down to Physics and Chemistry.
Mr. Kolb: Well, when the bomb was dropped and the secret was out, things changed rapidly, didn’t it? Of course, in the sense that the secretness was over with right?
Dr. Silverman: Right.
Mr. Kolb: You still lived inside the fence and then on until ’49.
Dr. Silverman: Right.
Mr. Kolb: And how did – did you like the fact that the town opened up in ’49 and guards went away?
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, we certainly didn’t object. You know it was funny, two things, in late ’46, we were on a trip up east to New Haven, and Dot was getting some treatment in an OBGYN in Philadelphia, but then we made a trip to Florida during the vacation period ’47-’48, Christmas/New Year���s thing, we were down in Florida visiting relatives there, when we heard that the reactor work was being transferred to Oregon and that the Pile Group were leaving for Chicago, Rickover’s bunch, and at that time, we didn’t realize that Carbide was going to take over the Laboratory. So when we heard about the Pile thing, I said to Dot, “Oh well, I’m not involved with that.” In fact, I was working on my thesis, and so we said, “So what.” Then we come back and we learn that Carbide is going to take it over, and knowing the background of – that Carbide had been running production plants, not research institutions, and talking with my thesis advisor Dr. John Swartout, who had learned what the conditions were at the K-25 and Y-12, the salaries and everything involved, we were not enthusiastic about Carbide taking over, and a number of, shall we call them, “naughty poems” were written. “We can���t abide with Carbide, [inaudible] the bowels we [inaudible] dreary.”
Mr. Kolb: But it happened anyway, I guess.
Dr. Silverman: But they learned rather quickly – and, in fact, Rucker, who became the Head, he was shrewd enough to realize that you don’t try to make a production plant out of a laboratory which is doing research.
Mr. Kolb: Keep the good people there.
Dr. Silverman: Right.
Mr. Kolb: Well are there any other unique experiences as we wind things down here that you want to record.
Dr. Silverman: Well, in the end of the tennis business, in 1990, I was selected by the Oak Ridge Sports Hall of Fame as the first tennis player.
Mr. Kolb: The first one.
Dr. Silverman: Yes, that they inducted. At the same time I was inducted with Dr. John Crews in swimming, Don Bordinger for football, and I’m trying to remember who the fourth one was [Emory Hale] – a group of four of us at that time were inducted. And the unique thing was that I obtained my highest national ranking. That September, I was playing in the national 75-and-over Tournament [in] North Carolina and I won four out of five matches. The only one I lost was to the winner of the tournament, the national champ. But I won the consolation bracket, and so I obtained a number 28th in the nation in the 75-and-over age group. And then my partner and I were ranked number thirteen in doubles nationally.
Mr. Kolb: Who was your partner?
Dr. Silverman: William Foster from Knoxville, who died seven years ago of Alzheimer’s. Jim, there is an article, a big article that Mike Cates wrote about our background, and it was tied in with something here. I can show you that on the wall.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I’ll look at it. You had an illustrious tennis career, almost maybe more so than your work career. That was a double dose of success. Well I know that the arts have been important to you and you and your wife have contributed a lot there and it’s been an amazing town we created and you were instrumental there. Well, I’ll look forward to talking to your wife, then, another day, and that’ll be great. Thank you, Mike.
Dr. Silverman: Okay.
[end of recording]